tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) (09/24/88)
In article <4808@juniper.uucp>, yelorose@juniper.uucp (Bob Mosley III) writes:
) Newsgroups: news.admin,rec.arts.comics,rec.arts.anime,rec.arts.tv,rec.arts.startrek,talk.bizarre
) Votes will be counted only if received via E-Mail, or if a voter
) cannot find an alternative path to this address, which does happen
I am not sure that it is good form to count votes which are
posted (instead of mailed) under any circumstances. However,
there are no doubt people (as indicated above) who may indeed
count such votes, possibly with the best intentions of being fair
and otherwise generally adhering to the common rules of net
voting.
I would like to see a scheme in place whereby someone else
(besides the newsgroup proponant) be given the task of collecting
votes. Pure "vote" messages should be easily tabulated
mechanically based on the "subject" line; any included text could
be peeled out and forwarded to someone else.
Can it be done, you ask? Well, I have a more complex mail-
reading daemon around which figures out based on mail propagation
which of our customer sites may be having problems. Picking out
three items ("vote", "yes" or "no", and "news.group.name") should
not be much of a challenge.
Before voting starts, but after the discussion period, the
central vote administrator would be contacted, given the
newsgroup name and a person to whom comments might be forwarded.
Then, votes (yes or no) would be mailed to the magical address
(say, "votes@lucky_site"), where they would be tabulated and the
comments forwarded.
One advantage to such a scheme (the one which prompted this
fast-growing article) is that such a device is sure to NOT count
posted votes. Not even votes posted with the text "I tried every
possible mailpath 15 times, and it always bounced" would be
counted. Even votes with the text "my mailer is broken, so
please count this vote" would go unheeded.
Perhaps the "uunet" folks could be imposed upon to set up such a
mailbox? (I might be willing to provide a tolerably crude script
or program to count the votes and keep the voter list.)
--
...!bikini.cis.ufl.edu!ki4pv!tanner ...!bpa!cdin-1!cdis-1!ki4pv!tanner
or... {allegra killer gatech!uflorida decvax!ucf-cs}!ki4pv!tannervote@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (Comp.archives voting) (09/28/88)
In article <7042@ki4pv.uucp> tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) writes: >Before voting starts, but after the discussion period, the >central vote administrator would be contacted, given the >newsgroup name and a person to whom comments might be forwarded. >Then, votes (yes or no) would be mailed to the magical address >(say, "votes@lucky_site"), where they would be tabulated and the >comments forwarded. the approach i took with my recent comp.archives vote was to edit the Reply-To: and From: lines to give the address of the vote taking mailbox. then, inside the article i requested the reader to simply reply to the article and edit the Subject: line to give the vote. the net result of this approach has been 246 votes received in about 2 weeks. by requesting the vote be placed on the Subject: line i can see how the vote is going by looking at the output of an 'h' command. this is the second vote i've taken this year, and by far the easiest. i have no complaints about having to work my butt off, in particular since i've not bothered to send replies or acknowlegements! [ not to worry, i have so many votes a few lost ones are not going to make a difference. ] oh yes - if you haven't voted on comp.archives [ a newsgroup for posting archive site information ], please reply to this letter and edit the Subject: line to indicate your choice. ain't that easy?